New Delhi: More than 90% of Twitter Inc.’s employees in India were let go over the weekend as part of Elon Musk’s global hiring freeze, drastically reducing the company’s engineering and product personnel in a market with the potential to develop, The Business Standard reported.

Due to the sensitive nature of the situation, persons familiar with the situation who asked to remain anonymous stated that the company had just over 200 employees in India before the cuts.

Global internet companies like Twitter, Meta Platforms Inc., and Google, a division of Alphabet Inc., depend on India’s sizable potential pool of new online users as a vital growth engine. However, the businesses must also comply with ever-stricter content laws designed to restrain the nation’s major tech companies.

According to one of the persons, the product and engineering team in India, which operated on a worldwide mandate, accounted for almost 70% of the jobs that were eliminated. According to the persons, positions were also eliminated in departments including marketing, public policy, and corporate communications.

Twitter, situated in San Francisco, California, cut the number of employees it had worldwide by nearly 3,700, or about half. An email asking for comment received no immediate response from Twitter.

India has one of the most heated political discussions on Twitter, with opposing parties frequently tossing accusations at one another and charging one another with disinformation campaigns. On the platform, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has more than 84 million fans. With its recently downsized employees in the nation, which has more than 100 different official languages, it is unclear how Twitter hopes to control that discourse.

Twitter’s offices in India are in New Delhi, Bengaluru in the south, and Mumbai’s financial district.

Globally, the corporation still employs roughly 3,700 employees, according to Bloomberg News. Musk is pressuring the remaining team members to produce new features rapidly, and in some cases, workers have stayed late at work to meet deadlines.